Red Hat launches ‘The JBoss Way’ initiative – so what is it?

The bookend to Red Hat Summit is the announcement of ‘The JBoss Way’ – a clever remarketing of the JBoss Developer Framework

Plenty of announcements have surfaced from Red Hat Summit
and JBossWorld this week, all giving some inkling into how the open
source giant was positioning itself for the coming
year.

But as a bookend to Red Hat’s activity over the past week, it
seemed apt to look at their marketing titled ‘The JBoss Way’ – a
new developer platform tying together a lot of exciting JBoss
projects under one roof. Effectively a rebranding of the
recently-announced JBoss Developer Framework.

The JBoss Way introduces a new set of developer
productivity-driven tools, frameworks and architectural designs for
next-generation applications – neatly bundling together Red Hat’s
main message over the last year, that they are ready formobile, the
cloud and more.

Heavy precedence has been put into Java’s foray into the
emerging worlds of HTML5, mobile, web browsing and cloud and Red
Hat’s work over the last year or so has been driven towards this.
The JBoss Way formally introduces emerging projects (and some
slightly glossed established ones) with guides to their two main
products – the Eclipse environment JBoss Developer Studio 5, and
JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 6 stack,

Technologies featuring under the JBoss Way banner include the
old guard such as Java EE 6, Hibernate 4, JBoss Forge and some
bright talent in testing suite Arquillian and Red Hat’s PaaS,
OpenShift. This seems like a perfect time to begin such an
initiative, advocating the integration of newer technologies and
forming a cohesive bond with others.

“Since its beginning more than a decade ago, JBoss has been
renowned for appealing to the Javamiddlewaredeveloper
community,” said Mark Little, senior director, Middleware
engineering at Red Hat, in a statement. “Over the past 10 years,
through efforts such as Hibernate, JPA, Seam, CDI and JBoss
Developer Studio, we’ve ensured that our focus on improving
developer productivity has remained core to everything we do,
including our work with the standards.

“Projects such as Drools, Switchyard, Errai and Infinispan
take this emphasis beyond Java EE so that whatever your area of
interest, JBoss tools offer the solutions you need to develop and
deploy your applications,” Little continued. “We care about
developers and I believe we’ve shown that time and time again, with
innovation throughout our projects and our products. We expect that
the momentum we’ve built up is only going to increase through The
JBoss Way initiative and collaborative projects.”

The JBoss Way hub boasts an impressive amount of resources
for each JBoss technology, with quick-starts, Maven archetypes,
screencasts and tutorials provided. This approach seems quite
similar to the recent JBoss Developer Framework, with reference
application guide TicketMonster also heavily featured in
this.

“Java EE 6 has proven to be an ideal stack to build
enterprise applications,” Paul Bakker, an engineer at Luminus
Consulting, said in a statement. “The Java EE ecosystem is very
large; however, it contains a lot of APIs and related tools. This
might be overwhelming for new developers, making it hard to get
started.“The JBoss Way gives you guidance on how to structure your
application, which tools to use and how to test your code to create
standards-based enterprise applications. Two of the highlights of
The JBoss Way are JBoss Forge and Arquillian. Forge is a tool that
makes it trivial to set up your Maven-based project and add Java EE
technology to it. Arquillian brings in-container integration tests
to Java EE, which gives you thepowerto test all
your code in an easy but realistic way,” Bakker said.

Whilst JDF is probably aimed at seasoned veterans, ‘The JBoss
Way’ should entice those previously unaware of Red Hat’s open
source powers and be a useful adage most importantly. Of course,
the term ‘JBossian’ holds great stock in the JBoss community, which
JBoss founder Marc Fleury coined to describe the zealous approach
the JBoss team took in the early days, and to show pride in being
open source advocates. All in all this seems like an ideal way to
showcase what JBoss does and a good way to round-up their most
important conference to date.